Joseph E. Persico (41 page)

Just three days after Sherwood's scuttling of Morde, FDR received a communication from Bill Donovan of stunning naïveté. Morde, as arranged by Lieutenant Colonel West, had indeed gone to see Donovan in Washington and had briefed him on his conversation with Papen and his peace proposal. Donovan then sent the twenty-six-page document to FDR with the following notation: “I beg you to read this carefully. It contains an idea that your skill and imagination could develop.” Donovan went on to repeat Morde's fabrication that General Hurley knew of the plan and had even agreed to carry it out. It is difficult to understand how a spymaster could have been so far behind the curve of events and support a scheme so inimical to what the President hoped to achieve at Tehran, particularly the risk of dealing behind the Soviet Union's back. West, in writing to his OSS chief about Morde, had added a postscript in longhand that read: “It is my understanding that Morde has orders to report to the President through General Strong.” Donovan may possibly have been ensnared by his own competitive impulses. The idea that Morde's plan might reach the President through his mortal enemy may have led Wild Bill to elbow his way in, paying less attention to the validity of Morde's intrigues than to beating Strong into the Oval Office.

On November 10, the day before he was to leave for Tehran, FDR rode out to National Airport to meet Cordell Hull, who was returning from a mission to Moscow. With the President were Mrs. Hull, and the acting secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius. The trip out was cold and sunless as the heavy limousine lumbered through Washington's gray streets. Previously, FDR had traveled in a car seized by the Treasury Department from Al Capone. But Mike Reilly, chief of the President's Secret Service detail, concluded that while the automobile may have carried enough armor for a gangster, it was insecure for a president. Reilly had persuaded friends in the Ford Motor Company to build Roosevelt an 8,000-pound bullet- and bombproof vehicle. As they rode along, FDR fed Stettinius, page by page, Bob Sherwood's denunciation of the Morde report, followed by Bill Donovan's simplistic endorsement of it. The President wanted Theodore Morde's passport yanked. People like him had no business causing mischief outside the country in the middle of a war, he told Stettinius. For anyone else, support of the discredited Morde would have marked a humiliating defeat. But not for the unsinkable Donovan. The President kept him on, and Wild Bill proceeded blithely on to the next rampart.

*

What the high-spirited, high-living George Earle was telling the President from Istanbul in the fall of 1943 seemed farfetched, but nevertheless alarming. On October 14, Earle sent the White House a coded cable reading: “Turkish source of my last four telegrams gives me following just received. Devastating robot land torpedo plane attack on England will surely take place this month from Northern France and Belgium.” Earle, as an intelligence operative, had compiled a spotty record thus far. A few months before, in August, he had reported to the President that the U.S. raid launched from Libya by 178 B-24 bombers against Romania's Ploe¸sti oil fields had been “a marvel of precision,” which it had not. The raid had caused substantial damage to fuel storage tanks and refineries; but Earle's estimate that a year to eighteen months would be required to rebuild the refineries and that “one half of Rumanian production [was] lost for a year” proved highly inaccurate. Furthermore, the raid had been carried out at a horrific cost. Of 1,733 airmen, 446 were killed, and only 33 of the aircraft flew home intact. The rest of the planes were shot down or shot up beyond repair.

Still, Earle had tapped some valuable sources, including the assistant air attaché at the German embassy in Turkey, a covert Austrian anti-Nazi. And his prediction of “robot” aerial strikes on London was not hollow. Eleven days after Earle's message, FDR received a confirming cable from Churchill, reading: “I ought to let you know that during the last six months evidence has continued to accumulate from many sources that the Germans are preparing an attack on England, particularly London, by means of very long-range rockets which may conceivably weigh 60 tons and carry an explosive charge of 10 to 20 tons.” Churchill further reported German experiments under way on a pilotless bomb-laden aircraft, Earle's “robot land torpedo plane.” Earle's intelligence had been essentially correct, but he was off in citing the year in which this weapon, the V-1, would strike Britain.

Churchill's science advisors were split as to whether the Germans could actually produce a workable rocket or robot. The Prime Minister, however, was less sanguine. He told FDR, “I am personally as yet unconvinced that they cannot be made.” His fear, shared by the President, was that flying bombs and rockets would disrupt the military buildup under way in Britain, “rupturing the Anglo-American plans for a major cross-channel return to the Continent.” So concerned was Churchill that he wanted the V-weapons branded as an unlawful form of warfare, and if Roosevelt and Stalin concurred, he wanted to retaliate by using poison gas against the Germans. He was dissuaded only by the argument of his advisors, not that using gas was immoral, but that a better countermeasure existed. “For this reason,” Churchill continued in his message to FDR, “we raided Peenemünde, which was their main experimental station.”

What was happening at Peenemünde, a thumb of land extending into the Baltic Sea, was indeed a high Hitler priority. He personally inspected the installations in 1943. Churchill, in his memoirs, describes the Führer's commitment to the work: “About June 10, he told his assembled military leaders that the Germans had only to hold out. By the end of 1943, London would be levelled to the ground and Britain forced to capitulate. October 20 was fixed as zero day for rocket attacks to begin.” But in the months between the Führer's visit and the scheduled unleashing of the secret weapons, the Peenemünde raid took place. On the night of August 17–18, 600 RAF heavy bombers dropped high explosives and incendiary bombs on the supposedly secret installations. Over 120 scientists and 600 foreign workers perished, including several laborers from Luxembourg who had been spying for British intelligence. The strike had set Hitler's timetable back; the question was by how long. On November 5, Roosevelt received an assessment from George Earle. “Austrian officer gives me following from his conversation yesterday with Dr. Zever Kuehn, Chief German war organization [in] Turkey,” Earle reported. The President quickly relayed verbatim to Churchill what Earle had told him, including misspellings. “We too have received many reports of the German rocket activity. Production is said to have been delayed due to death in bombing the experimental station at Peenemünde of Lieutenant General Shemiergembeinski. The only information recently coming to me, which might be of value to you, is a statement that factories manufacturing the rocket bomb are situated in Kania Friedrichshafen, Mixtgennerth Berlin, Kugellawerke Schwein-furt, Wiener Neustadt.” Earle had presented to FDR a typical spy's report, a mélange of fact, rumor, and misinformation. No one, for example, with the near-unpronounceable name of the reportedly dead general was ever identified as involved in German rocket building. Despite the raid, Hitler's confidence in and dependence on the super weapons did not waver. After Peenemünde was struck, he ordered that work be continued in an underground plant hollowed out of the Harz Mountains near Wordhausen in central Germany.

More alarming to FDR was what Earle further reported, that after the predicted aerial “torpedo” strike against England, “Stratospheric attack on America will follow.” Were Earle's sources alarmist or merely premature? Did Germany possess weapons capable of reaching the United States? Magic decrypts available to the President in September and October 1943 from Ambassador Oshima's embassy in Berlin to Tokyo seemed to confirm the possibility. Oshima described a high-performance, long-distance aircraft that Luftwaffe aeronautical engineers were working on, the Me-264. The objective, he revealed, was a bomber that could reach New York.

Chapter XIX

Deceivers and the Deceived

ON THE raw, drizzly night of November 11, 1943, the President left the White House to begin a multi-legged journey that would eventually bring him to Tehran to join Churchill and meet Stalin for the first time. He chose to spend the nine-day Atlantic crossing aboard the battleship
Iowa,
a floating fortress bristling with nine 16-inch guns and manned by a crew the size of a small city, twenty-six hundred officers and men, and commanded by his former naval aide Captain John McCrea. As the presidential party made its way up the gangway to furled banners and the boatswain's pipe, Mike Reilly, the White House security chief, went over his checkoff list for presidential sea voyages. As Reilly once described this list, it included: “A supply of money to bank the President, he never carried any in his own pockets. A supply of special foods. FDR's tastes were easily satisfied. Give him corned beef hash for breakfast, and coffee in his big cup, four and a half inches in diameter, and the day was well started.” Other presidential necessities included cases of Saratoga Springs mineral water, long wooden matches, the only kind FDR would use to light his cigarettes, deep-sea fishing gear, and enough movies to show one a night, particularly slapstick comedies, leggy musicals, and films starring Walter Huston, FDR's favorite actor. For bedtime, Reilly laid by a well-stocked library of whodunits.

After the
Iowa
deposited him at Oran, Algeria, the President flew to Cairo, where he met briefly with Chiang Kai-shek. On Saturday, November 27, Roosevelt, an uneasy flier, boarded the presidential Douglas DC-4, the
Sacred Cow,
and long hours later touched down beneath the massif of the Elburz Mountains at a Soviet-controlled airfield outside Tehran. With him were Harry Hopkins, Averell Harriman, Pa Watson, Admiral William Leahy, General Marshall, FDR's daughter, Anna, and her husband, Major John Boettiger. Hopkins saw his role regarding Roosevelt and Churchill as “a catalytic agent between two prima donnas.”

The Tehran script was largely foreordained. Stalin would press for an Anglo-American invasion of Europe at the earliest possible date. Churchill, though largely resigned to the landings in France, would continue to argue for a run up through the Balkans, and FDR would seek to please both. Further, the Big Three would try to design a strategy to draw Turkey into the conflict on their side. And they would toss back and forth the hand grenade of Poland's postwar fate. FDR's personal priority remained the political seduction of Joseph Stalin. As he once told a disbelieving Bill Bullitt, who thoroughly distrusted the Soviet dictator, “I think if I give [Stalin] everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return . . . noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” The Stalin whom Roosevelt hoped to win over with sweet reason had, during the purges of the thirties, murdered all of Lenin's Politburo, the exiled Leon Trotsky, the chief of the General Staff, and 25 percent of senior Soviet military officers, 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress, 98 of 139 members of the 1934 Central Committee, 90 percent of Soviet ambassadors, and two secret police chiefs, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, who had produced the trumped-up evidence against the other victims. It was as if an American president upon coming to power would have had most of the House and Senate shot, along with opposition leaders and potential rivals within his own party, most of the generals, and the American ambassadors to nine out of ten countries.

Mike Reilly was wrestling with a more immediate problem than the strategic decisions before the three Allied partners. The burly Irishman who lifted the President, as he would a child, in and out of limousines, on and off trains, and up stairwells had come to the Iranian capital in advance of the presidential party to work out security arrangements. Upon his arrival, his Soviet counterpart, General Artikov of the NKVD, told Reilly that thirty-eight German agents had recently parachuted near Tehran. They had two missions, Artikov claimed: One was to sabotage the railroad connecting Basra and Tehran, thus cutting the lifeline for shipping American lend-lease armaments and supplies through Iran to the Soviet Union. The second mission was to assassinate the Allied leaders.

Hitler was fatalistic about his own life. In 1942 he told his staff: “There can never be absolute security against fanatics and idealists. . . . If some fanatic wishes to shoot me or kill me with a bomb, I am no safer sitting down than standing up.” However, he had shown no taste for killing enemy heads of state, at least in the early part of the war. But as the crimes of his regime became known, Hitler's position shifted. He recognized that should Germany lose, he could expect no mercy from the victors. Thus, there was no point in exempting their leaders from assassination.

By the fall of 1943, the SD, the intelligence wing of Heinrich Himmler's SS, had discovered that the Allied leaders planned to meet in Tehran sometime toward the end of November. With this intelligence in hand, an assassination plot had hatched in the fertile imagination of SS officer Otto Skorzeny, the daredevil Hitler favorite who had recently snatched the deposed Mussolini from his Allied captors off a stoutly guarded Italian mountaintop. Under Skorzeny's tutelage, a hit team began training near Vinnitsa in German-occupied Ukraine. Its members practiced assassination by explosives, firearms, knives, and poison. By September 10, SS chief Himmler had secured Hitler's approval of the plot. The mission to murder the Allied leaders was code-named Long Pounce.

Even before his arrival in Tehran, FDR had found himself at the center of a hospitality tug-of-war. Churchill wanted him to stay at the British embassy, and Stalin wanted him at the Soviet diplomatic compound. FDR declined both. As he told his staff, “I like to be more independent than a guest can hope to be.” He and Churchill had shared quarters at the August 1943 Quebec conference, and FDR had found the Prime Minister's drop-ins at all hours, however stimulating, crowding his freedom to maneuver. The President chose to stay in Tehran at the American legation as the guest of the minister, Louis G. Dreyfus.

At nine-thirty the following morning, a Sunday, Averell Harriman found the President breakfasting on corned beef hash served on his own White House china and silver flown in on the
Sacred Cow
and sipping coffee from his giant mug. Harriman explained that he had an urgent message from Stalin. The Soviet and British embassies in Tehran were practically next-door neighbors, but the American legation was almost two miles away. Stalin feared, Harriman said, that the three Allied leaders, in traveling back and forth through Tehran, could face an “unhappy incident.” What sort of incident? FDR asked. “Assassination,” Harriman replied. The pro-Allied shah, Reza Pahlavi, had many enemies, Harriman added, and Tehran teemed with Nazi agents and sympathizers. Therefore, Stalin wanted Roosevelt to be safe at the Soviet compound.

FDR declined, still resisting becoming a prisoner of either British or Soviet hosts. Until now, Mike Reilly had hesitated to alarm the President. But upon hearing Harriman, he was emboldened to make a rare intrusion into a Roosevelt conversation. He told the President about General Artikov's report of German agents parachuted into the area. All the more reason for the President to move, Harriman urged. Suppose Stalin was attacked by these assassins en route to the American embassy to see Roosevelt? The responsibility would be on the President's head, Harriman noted. The argument carried the day. Roosevelt decided to move.

The legation became a whirlwind of motion as Reilly's Secret Service agents, military attachés, and embassy staff swung into action. By 3
P.M
., a motorcade had been assembled—jeeps armed with machine guns, military police revving their motorcycles, three automobiles full of Secret Service agents cradling tommy guns, and in the middle the gleaming black limousine of the President. The caravan rolled out of the legation grounds onto Ferdousi Avenue, the main route to the Soviet compound. Russian and American troops lined the thoroughfare shoulder to shoulder, a human wall sealing off the presidential party from the Iranian masses. The Red Army alone, under security chief Beria's orders, had brought in three thousand men to protect the Allied leaders.

Few of the enemy parachutists trained by Skorzeny in Ukraine were German; most were anti-Communist Russians recruited from Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war camps. They had been outfitted with Russian army uniforms to blend into the Soviet security force in Tehran, where they would reassemble to carry out their mission. However, in a conspiracy within a conspiracy, several of the presumed collaborators were actually loyal Communists who, upon arriving in Tehran, immediately betrayed the plot to the Soviet army command. All but six of the hit men were quickly rounded up. But the six remaining, led by a German SS Sturmbannführer, Rudolf von Holten-Pflug, who hoped to become the next Skorzeny, remained determined to fulfill their mission.

Any soldier, Russian or American, in that human cordon on Ferdousi Avenue who hoped to catch a glimpse of Franklin Roosevelt was doomed to be deceived. The figure in the limousine wearing the familiar Roosevelt fedora was Robert Holmes, a Secret Service agent, posing as FDR, on only the second known occasion during which the President used a double, the first being during the 1941 Atlantic conference. As the motorcade left the American legation, the President, Harry Hopkins, Major Boettiger, and Admiral Leahy, slipped out of a back entrance. The President was lifted into a nondescript Army staff car and the others piled in after him. Reilly instructed the driver to get the President to the Soviet embassy as swiftly and inconspicuously as possible, stopping for nothing. No escort accompanied the lone car as it plunged into narrow back streets, alleyways, and at one point bumped along a dirt path. FDR grinned the entire way, reveling in the excitement, while the others tried to share his enthusiasm. For a man condemned to a wheelchair, it was a rare treat to experience physical adventure. The car slid through the gates of the Russian compound just ahead of the official entourage.

Stalin gave up the main residence, the only steam-heated building in the city, to Roosevelt and moved his party into a smaller villa. “The servants who made the President's bed and cleaned his room,” Harry Hopkins later noted, “were all members of the highly efficient OGPU [secret police] and expressive bulges were plainly discernible in the hip pockets under their white coats.” Along with the comfortable accommodations and attentive servants, every room in the villa was bugged by hidden microphones.

The President had barely settled in when Stalin came calling. FDR was wheeled into a commodious sitting room to meet the source of all power in the Soviet Union. Approaching him was a compact figure, two hundred solid pounds packed onto a five-foot six-inch frame. Stalin wore a plain but well-tailored brown uniform adorned with a single medal, a gold star suspended from a red and gold ribbon. However lacking in stature, the man projected a palpable presence. As he extended his hand to FDR, the President smiled eagerly and said, “I have tried for a long time to bring this about.” Harry Hopkins has left a sharply etched sketch of the marshal. “There was no waste of word, gesture, nor mannerism. It was like talking to a perfectly co-ordinated machine, an intelligent machine. . . . No man could forget the picture of the dictator of Russia . . . an austere, rugged, determined figure in boots that shone like mirrors, [and] stout baggy trousers. . . . He laughs often enough, but it's a short laugh, somewhat sardonic, perhaps. There is no small talk in him.” They made an odd pair: the revolutionary who had robbed banks to topple the czar and who had the blood of millions of his countrymen on his hands, and the Hudson River patrician, governed by humane, idealistic impulses. It was as if little Lord Fauntleroy in his velvet suit was determined to show fairness and fraternity toward a streetwise urchin.

That night, the President hosted a dinner for Stalin and Churchill. The Filipino mess stewards, having managed to prepare the meal in a strange kitchen on short notice, were clearing away the plates when all eyes turned toward the President. “Roosevelt was about to say something,” one guest recalled, “when suddenly, in the flick of an eye, he turned green and great drops of sweat began to bead off his face; he put a shaky hand to his forehead,” and complained of severe stomach cramps. Had the assassins succeeded? Had the President been poisoned? Harry Hopkins had FDR quickly wheeled to his bedroom and summoned Admiral McIntire. The President's physician examined his patient, and minutes later a smiling Hopkins returned to the dining room to report that the President had suffered only from acute indigestion.

The Tehran conference ended on December 1. Stalin won assurance that Overlord, the invasion of France, would occur in May 1944, six months off. Poland's postwar borders were not agreed upon, and the Turks were not lured into the war. At one point the President had thrown out a suggestion that must have appealed to Stalin. Maybe the way to spike Germany's aggressive impulses in the future, he said, would be to break the country into the five separate states existing before Bismarck had forged them into modern Germany.

Back home, holding a press conference after the Tehran meeting, the President gleefully took a reporter's question allowing him to segue into the assassination plot. He was asked, “Is there anything you can tell us about the method of your travels?” He could not give a direct answer, FDR replied, because the enemy “would know that you were leaving, and you are always, the whole distance—you are under—practically under the range of German planes. And it's like—like shooting a duck sitting on the water for a German pursuit plane to go after a transport plane without any guns on it.” He then described how Stalin had persuaded him to leave the American embassy for the Soviet compound. “And that night,” he added, “I got word from Marshal Stalin that they had got word of a German plot. Well, no use going into details,” he ended with a mysterious smile.